Eugene weekly., June 15, 2017, Page 11, Image 11

‘IT DIDN’T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY’
When Thigpen looked back, here’s what she saw.
She was in her late 20s and married with two young
daughters when she came out to her family as gay.
“We were living in rural Arkansas,” Thigpen says. “My
oldest daughter, Erin Lee, was 5, and my youngest, Paige,
was 2.”
Thigpen’s then-husband, 16 years her elder, at first took
the news in stride.
“Initially, he wasn’t so upset, nor surprised,” Thigpen
says. “When he and I got married, I was already attracted to
women, but I believed I could choose to be heterosexual.”
While her kids were little, Thigpen was a stay-at-home
mom, a job she adored. She tried to be straight. “I made a
go of it, but it wasn’t on my choice list,” she says.
Thigpen divorced her husband and, at first, the pair
shared joint custody of their daughters.
Then things changed.
In a suit brought against her after the initial divorce and
custody hearings, the state of Arkansas awarded full custody
of Thigpen’s girls to their father, based largely on Thigpen’s
sexual orientation while questioning her emotional stability
and referencing a distant attempt at self harm.
“He realized the power that my sexual orientation
afforded him,” Thigpen says. “But I don’t want to villainize
him.”
Thigpen flips through the score she’s written for The
Woman of Salt and sips a bit of water.
“They got a homophobic lawyer. The judge is a deacon
in the Southern Baptist Church,” Thigpen says. “I got an
original judgment and took it to the state Supreme Court,
where I also got the shit kicked out of me.”
Thigpen half-smiles, shaking her head. Then she looks
at me, almost as if I’m a foreigner.
“How can I explain the Deep South?” she says. “My
own parents were instrumental in leading the charge
against me.”
Thigpen grows quiet, her eyes focused.
“My parents were, and are, supporters of David Duke.
My dad had a colleague who wrote his master’s thesis on
the disproportionately small size of the Negro brain. They
were — we were — steeped in racism, homophobia. It’s
an illness and a blight — culturally, spiritually. I’m totally
estranged from my parents and brothers.”
In the courtroom, Thigpen’s mother and father testified
against her. Claiming that she was unfit, Thigpen’s parents
encouraged the court to terminate their daughter’s rights to
her own children.
“There is no immunity from that kind of assault,”
Thigpen says. “No defense.”
In an instant, Thigpen’s role as primary caregiver was
reduced to dust. “The court order limited my access to the
girls and said I couldn’t take them out of state,” Thigpen
says. “I was shunned, criminalized and impoverished.”
‘I CANNOT TELL YOU WHY’
Thigpen turned 60 this year. She grew up in a tiny town
— Lecompte, Louisiana — where she learned to play the
piano from Miss Martha Faye White, “who was classically
trained and offered lessons out of her home,” Thigpen says.
“I studied from the age of 8 or 9 right through high
school. And I’ve never moved anywhere without my piano.”
Thigpen’s father taught English when she was growing
up, and her mother stayed home. She has two siblings, an
older brother and a younger one. She has no contact with
any of them.
“Family estrangement is probably much more prevalent
than we are willing to talk about,” she says. “It’s like a
collective secret.”
Though wounded by her family’s betrayal, for the sake
of her girls Thigpen persisted.
After the court tore her daughters from her, Thigpen
moved to Austin, Texas, to pursue a doctorate. And every
two to three weeks, for years, she made the 500-mile one-
way drive from Austin to Little Rock and back to see her
girls for a few precious hours.
“Every time I could, I got in my beat-up truck and
drove to Arkansas,” she says. “I think this opera was being
written on the drives home. My blood was a caustic sludge
of rage.”
‘WHAT WAS AND WILL EVER BE’
In the midst of profound loss, Thigpen completed a
Ph.D. in biochemistry. It’s a subject that fascinated her
from the moment she’d cracked her first chem textbook in
college. “If we know biochemistry, then we know the basis
for all things physiological,” she says. “Birth, death, life,
disease — everything.”
In 1995, she met the woman who would become her
spouse, Andrea Halliday, who had a little boy, Toby.
“I met him when he was 5 or 6,” Thigpen says proudly.
She continues to tell her story as she moves briskly
around the house, collecting family photos off the walls in
various rooms.
“I was in a start-up company in Dallas, and Andrea was
on the neurosurgical faculty at U.T. Southwestern. But
a lesbian interracial family — in Texas?” Thigpen says,
calling down from her home’s second floor.
Thigpen returns, loaded down with framed photos.
She recounts a frightening moment in a parking lot. She
and Halliday — and little Toby, who’s African-American
— were just heading to their car when they were confronted
by a large aggressive man who clearly had a problem with
their sexual orientation and the color of their little boy’s
skin. “He’s talking to us, standing like this — big — and
I’m saying, ‘Get in the car! Get in the car!’”
“There’s no way I could have written the opera in Texas
or Arkansas, because I didn’t feel safe,” Thigpen says.
“Eugene, Oregon, is the promised land.”
After choosing the community for its open-minded
culture, the family moved to Eugene in 2005.
Thigpen assembles photos of her daughters as children
and as adults, a portrait of handsome grown-up Toby, and
snapshots of Halliday on the coffee table. She shows recent
Healing our
World:
A Deeper
Look at Food
The World Peace Diet
A lecture - presentation by
Will Tuttle, Ph.D.
Sponsored by
EVEN (The Eugene Veg Education Network)
Saturday • June 24, 2017 • 2pm
Eugene Library
100 W. 10th Av, Eugene OR
[Parking is free on Saturdays in the library’s basement garage - Enter from Charnelton Street.]
PRESENTATION IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.
Author of the best-seller The World
Peace Diet, Dr. Will Tuttle delivers
an inspiring talk about the hidden
dimensions of our culture’s food
system. You will discover new
connections and learn how to make
positive changes that nurture wellness,
awaken insight and awareness, and
bring healing to our world.
eugeneweekly.com • June 15, 2017
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